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Event CS 201: A Forensic Dissection of Stuxnet, CAREY NACHENBERG, Symantec - UCLA

Date: Nov 29, 2011
Time: 04:15 PM

A Forensic Dissection of Stuxnet

Carey Nachenberg

Symantec - UCLA

Abstract:

The Stuxnet computer worm is perhaps the most complicated piece of malicious software ever built - roughly 50 times the size of the typical computer virus, this threat leveraged a huge array of new techniques to spread itself, conceal itself and to attack Iranian nuclear enrichment centrifuges.  This talk will provide a detailed dissection of the Stuxnet worm, answering such questions as how it spread, how it evaded detection, what it did once it found its target, and ultimately, how successful it was.

Bio:

Carey Nachenberg, Symantec Fellow and Chief Architect of Symantec’s Security Technology and Response (STAR) division, has been an innovator at Symantec Corporation for the past twenty years.  As Chief Architect, Mr. Nachenberg drives the technical strategy for all of Symantec’s core security technologies and security content, which in total protect hundreds of millions of customers around the world.  During his time at Symantec, Mr. Nachenberg has led the design and development of Symantec’s core antivirus, intrusion prevention and reputation-based security technologies; his work in these areas has garnered over 50 United States patents.  He holds BS and MS degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from University of California at Los Angeles, where he continues to serve as an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Computer Science and a member of UCLA’s Computer Science Alumni Advisory Board.


DATE:  Tuesday, November 29

 

** Refreshments at 4:00pm, Speaker at 4:15pm **

 

TIME:  4:15 – 5:45 P.M.

 

PLACE: 3400 Boelter Hall

Event CS 201: Piles and Piles for Miles and Miles, CHRIS SURDAK, Accenture

Date: Nov 22, 2011
Time: 04:15 PM

Piles and Piles for Miles and Miles

Chris Surdak

Accenture

Abstract:  

Social Media is generating sweeping changes throughout our society.  While many of these changes are for the better, some impacts are less obvious, less pleasant, and far more insidious than most technologists and business people realize.  Moore’s law has become so pervasive a meme (an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture, similar to genes in biological systems), that it is indeed used to characterize many exponential-growth relationships, as if such relentless compounding were now the norm in our society.  However with Social Media, we appear to be entering a new growth era, following a new paradigm: that of Moore’s Law squared.  There is an unintended consequence of Social Media, related to storing the astronomical volume of information generated and shared across the network.  This vast trove of information, in the form of documents, emails, tweets, and posts, can and does allow third parties to probe our thoughts and our pasts in order to profile us as either potential threats, customers, or perhaps both.  The ways in which what you share can be used to identify and characterize you are only slowly becoming apparent to the masses.

Bio: 

Christopher Surdak is an industry-recognized expert in Collaboration and Content Management, Information Security, Regulatory Compliance, and Cloud Computing with nearly 20 years of professional experience. Presently, he is the senior manager for storage technologies for Accenture, where he helps Fortune 500 companies design and implement enterprise-scale information management systems.

Mr. Surdak has held similar roles with Siemens, Dell, Citibank, and Mars & Company. Mr. Surdak began his career with Lockheed Martin Astrospace, where he was a spacecraft systems engineer for a range of spacecraft programs including GPS Flight 2, Landsat 6 and 7, Telstar, Intelsat, Echostar, and the International Space Station.

Mr. Surdak holds an Executive Masters in Technology Management and a Moore Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Pennsylvania State University. He also holds a CISSP Master’s certificate from Villanova University and is presently earning his Juris Doctor from Taft University.

Hosted by Prof Jens Palsberg

REFRESHMENTS at 4:00 pm, SPEAKER at 4:15 pm 

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 22, 2011 

PLACE: 3400 BOELTER HALL

TIME: 4:15 – 5:45 PM

Event CS 201: SEPP: SATe-enabled phylogenetic placement, TANDY WARNOW, University of Texas at Austin

Date: Nov 03, 2011
Time: 04:15 PM

SEPP: SATe-enabled phylogenetic placement

Professor Tandy Warnow

University of Texas at Austin

Abstract:

Phylogenetic placement arises in the analysis of metagenomic data, inwhich the objective is to insert short molecular sequences (called "query sequences") into an existing phylogenetic tree and alignment on full-length sequences for the same gene.  Phylogenetic placement has the potential to provide information beyond pure species identification (i.e, the association of metagenomic reads to existing species), because it can also give information about the evolutionary relationships between these query sequences and to known species.  We present SEPP, a general "boosting" technique to improve the accuracy and/or speed of phylogenetic placement techniques.  The key algorithmic aspect of SEPP is a dataset decomposition technique in SATe (Liu et al., Science 2009), a method that utilizes an iterative divide-and-conquer technique to co-estimate alignments and trees on large molecular sequence datasets.  We show that SEPP improves current phylogenetic placement methods, placing metagenomic sequences more accurately when the set of input sequences has a large evolutionary diameter and produces placements of comparable accuracy in a fraction of the time for easier cases.

Joint work with Siavash Mirarab and Nam Nguyen, PhD students at UT-Austin.

Bio:  

Tandy Warnow is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin.  She received her PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley in 1991 under the supervision of Gene Lawler, and was a postdoc with Simon Tavare and Mike Waterman at USC from 1991-1992.  Her research focuses on the development of mathematical models and algorithms for estimating evolutionary history in Biology and Historical Linguistics.  Her research is currently funded by the National Science Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.  She has also been awarded a David and Lucile Packard Foundation Fellowship, a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellowship, and the NSF Young Investigator Award.  She currently chairs the BDMA study section at NIH.

Hosted by Prof Sebastien Roch

 

DATE:  Thursday, November 3, 2011

 

** Refreshments at 4:00pm, Speaker at 4:15pm **

 

TIME:  4:15 – 5:45 P.M.

 

PLACE: 3400 Boelter Hall

Event CS 201: Open Source and Big Data at Facebook, JONATHAN GRAY, Facebook

Date: Oct 25, 2011
Time: 04:15 PM
Location: 3400 Boelter Hall

Abstract:

This talk will be technical and focus on the different types of applications we are building with Hadoop and HBase at Facebook.  I will talk about how we made our decisions, share some numbers, and drill into a few particular use cases.

 

Bio:

Jonathan Gray is a software engineer at Facebook and works with the data warehousing and database infrastructure teams.  A committer on the Apache HBase project, Jonathan is currently focused on expanding the usage of Hadoop and HBase at Facebook, especially around online and transactional use cases.

Hosted by Carlo Zaniolo


DATE:  TUESDAY, OCTOBER 25

 

** Refreshments at 4:00pm, Speaker at 4:15pm **

 TIME:  4:15 – 5:45 P.M.

PLACE: 3400 Boelter Hall

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